by Jack Lewis
Good girl, thought Heather.
Charles nodded his head. “Your mum is a sensible woman. Let’s hope she stays that way.”
With that he straightened up and nodded to the two soldiers. Max gave another look around the room and then walked out of it. Charles turned to Heather.
“Stay safe. Both of you.”
After he left the house Kim moved off the sofa, walked up to her mother and threw her arms around her. It was a closeness they rarely shared, despite the love between them. Heather had always found physical contact strange. She thought that having a kid might solve that, but hugs always felt awkward even when they were from her only child. Still, the sentiment hit home and this time, she was happy to return the embrace.
“He scares me,” said Kim.
“You did a great job hiding it. I mean that.”
“Why does he want to find the DC’s so much?”
It was a question that few really knew the answer to. Even Heather didn’t know the full extent of things, though she knew enough. The problem was that the answer was not one fit for the ears of children. Then again, there was no such thing as children anymore. Despite her daughter being twelve years old, Heather needed her to grow beyond her years. She couldn’t be a kid, she needed to be a small adult. She needed to know the truth.
“They use their bodies to cure the infected,” she said.
“I thought you turn when you’re infected?”
“Not always, Kim.”
“What would you do if I was one of them, mum? Would you help me hide?”
It was a question that peeled away Heather’s skin, sawed through her skull and buried itself deep inside her brain. It was something she’d turned over in her head again and again in bed while the rest of the Capita slept. Once, she thought the question was an almighty “yes”. That it was unquestionable; if she knew someone was a DC, she would help them.
After seeing Jenny led away by the bounty hunter and turning her back on the DC boy in Cresstone, Heather wasn’t so sure. She was losing the fragile high ground she’d built up for herself. There was always that little part of her that knew what was wrong and what was right, and she always drew pride from the idea that she would stand up when she needed to. Now it had been tested, she knew it was bullshit.
7
Ed
He thought for a while of what to say, but the words dissolved into the air before he got a chance to speak them. Finally he said the only thing he could.
“Bethelyn?”
Dark rings sat under her eyes and her skin was faded, like clothing run through the washing machine too many times. She looked hollow as if she had lost weight over the last few minutes, though Ed knew it was impossible. Nevertheless, part of her was gone.
“I can’t think about it. Alright? Because if I do, I can’t breathe. So I don’t want to hear anything from you that isn’t closely related to our survival. I don’t think you realise the shit we’re in Ed, but the infection has hit Golgoth.”
Her voice was scratchy and higher pitched than usual. It reminded him of when James had come running away from the cliffs and told everyone he’d seen a man down there submerged under the waves.
He knew how she felt, in a way. After dad died there was a time when everyone on the island would tell him and James how sorry they were and what a great guy dad was. Sometimes it made it worse. People grieved in their own ways, and the worst thing you could do to a fresh wound was to rip the bandage off it. It hadn’t hit Bethelyn yet but when it did, it was going to hit hard.
“How did it get here?” he said. “That’s what I want to know.”
“The beauty of Golgoth was always how remote it is. I remember when me and sis were kids on the mainland and we’d play ‘Where do you go when the monsters come.’ How prophetic, right? Laura always said something stupid like grandma’s house.”
“What did you say?”
“I always said an island far away, somewhere no boats went. Somewhere that monsters couldn’t swim. The beauty of it is that now we’re all on this crumbling shithole, the remoteness is going to screw us over. We need to get off Golgoth, Ed.”
Somewhere outside the house, someone screamed. Bethelyn grabbed a brass poker from next to the fireplace. It had been years since the fire was lit, though Ed could picture his dad with the poker in his hand, prodding the coals and waiting for them to burn.
“Not yet,” said Ed. “We need a plan.”
Bethelyn gripped the poker so hard her knuckles were white. She looked so tense that she was going to snap in two. At the same time the life was drained out of her; dead eyes, pale skin.
“I’m not going to waste time debating. Here’s the thing. In council meetings Gordon would always ramble on about the infection, talk about what to do if it ever hit Golgoth. The upshot is that we kitted the town hall basement with everything from firelighters to flares.”
“I don’t relish the idea of sitting in a cellar and waiting for everything to go to hell.”
“Look around you, Ed. You don’t have to wait. Hell’s already found us.”
Ed was going to pick up the knife, but it seemed wrong to carry the weapon that had killed Bethelyn’s daughter. Instead he went into the kitchen and picked a fresh one off the rail.
“I don’t know.”
“There isn’t just food down there,” said Bethelyn. “We wanted to be clever about it. We didn’t want to be like those idiots on the news who die in their underpants when infected smash through their windows. The cellar is full of guns.”
“Guns?”
“Farmer’s shotguns, mostly. A couple of hunting rifles from the Reilly Estate. A confiscated handgun. It’s better than stabbing them with a butter knife.”
Ed nodded. “Then we have our plan.”
“We have. We just need the keys.”
“You don’t have any?”
“Gordon was a bastard. Wouldn’t let them out of his sight. I asked him 'what do we do if you’re dead?' Know what he said? ‘If I’m dead then you’ve been rotting for days.’”
It was something he could imagine the old man saying. Gordon had called round his house once, soon after James had gone. He tried to convince Ed to move out of his house and lodge with one of the families on the island. He didn’t even pretend he was doing it for Ed’s own good; he was clear that he wanted to use the Furness home as a store. Ed told him to fuck off.
He perched on the edge of the settee. The arm of it bent under his weight, having worn away through years of use. It was just one of the many things that had slowly faded away and was never replaced.
“It didn’t look good when I was at his house,” said Ed.
“You went there?”
He nodded. “When you were out. Before…I just needed to get my head together.”
“Of course. You told me already. My head’s fucked.”
Ed stood up. “Listen, are you sure you’re okay to do this? That you don’t want to – “
Bethelyn’s face suddenly burnt red and she strode across the room. A second later Ed felt a hard slap across his face. He felt a flash of anger despite himself, though he let it wear away until soon all he felt was the stinging of his skin.
“I don’t want to hear another damn word about it. Do you understand? I just can’t hear it, can’t talk about it. Promise me.”
The last two words choked out of her mouth so pathetically that they could have been grunts. Her eyes were buckets filled to the brim that would spill with the slightest nudge.
“I promise,” he said.
He decided that actually, he didn’t have the slightest clue what she was going through. His old man going was one thing, but despite living together for years, he’d never really known him. He’d never made the effort. He had no idea of the hell this woman was going through, and however she chose to deal with it was her business.
“Let’s go.”
***
The streets were eerie from the total absence of horror. There was n
o noise, no infected, no blood. Even the wind had stilled as though it were catching a breath from the hammering it had given the roofs and walls of Golgoth. The village looked like it usually did on any given morning.
A man ran out from a house in front of them. Ed took a sharp breath. He gripped the knife and wondered if he had the guts to use it, but ice had frozen around his legs and wouldn’t let him move. Bethelyn lifted her poker to waist height and stood ready. As the man got nearer he realised it was Steve Cheshunt, a dairy farmer. He stopped ten feet in front of the two of them and sunk to his knees, and Ed realised that his right ear had been torn clean off. He looked at them pleadingly and opened his mouth, and Ed recoiled in horror when he saw that Steve had no tongue.
Vicki Cheshunt walked out of her front gate and down the street toward her husband. Ed couldn’t decide if she was infected or not, and it was when she sprang onto Steve’s back and buried her teeth in his neck that he knew for sure. As she tore flesh from his neck, it sounded like a dog gorging on meat.
As though called for by some unseen stage director, there was the sound of footsteps on stone as an old man emerged from their left. Ed backed away from the husband and wife in front of him and readied his knife. The old man fixed his stare on Ed, and it was only then that he realised it was Gordon. His face was so changed that he hadn’t recognised the man. The blood had been drained out of him and his skin was a mess of wrinkles and cuts.
Ed tried to move, but his legs may as well have been made from wood. He willed them to fall under his control but they ignored him, leaving him feeling numb except for the rising panic in his chest.
The old man passed by Ed and pounced on Bethelyn. She pushed him away with her left hand, screaming in pain as she made contact. A shock zapped Ed’s chest, and the words flew through Ed’s head without giving him time to process them. She’s been bitten.
Steve tried to scream but all that came out was a gurgle. His wife traced her teeth around his neck and gave him the last love bite he would ever receive. The ice around Ed’s unfroze and he found himself finally able to move. He didn’t know what to do. Should he help Steve? Or was he already dead? He had probably been doomed by the bite on his ear. Or maybe he was immune.
Instead he turned to his right, grabbed Gordon Rigby by the shoulder and spun him round. The man saw Ed and opened his mouth and growled, spraying Ed’s face with blood. Fighting the rise of bile in his stomach, Ed lifted his knife and with one sharp movement jabbed it through Gordon’s eye socket.
Bethelyn, following Ed’s example, walked up to Vicki Cheshunt, raised her poker, and brought it down in an ark so that it pierced the top of the woman’s skull. Her brain was punctured and she collapsed to the floor.
“Did he bite you?”
Bethelyn held up her left hand. It was bloody, but there were no bite marks. The blood was from the cuts on her knuckles from when she had punched the wall.
“This is so screwed,” she said.
There was more shouting, and a man and a woman ran by the wall that lined Steve Cheshunt’s house and met Ed and Bethelyn in the middle of the street. Their cheeks had colour and their eyes looked alive, and Ed realised that Judith Plum and Gary Buckley weren’t going to try and eat him.
Judith stepped over Gordon’s body as if it were just an obstruction in the street. Gary bent over and gave four heaves from his stomach, but they were dry.
“What now?” said Ed. His legs had thawed but his brain was still frozen.
Bethelyn wiped the poker on her pants so that the brass shone.
“We get the guns. Find out who else is alive. Get a boat and get the hell off this place.”
Ed looked up the street toward the town hall a half mile away. At the top of it, a channel of water separated from a puddle and ran in a line toward them. As it passed by Steve and Vicky Cheshunt it mixed with their bodies and turned red, and then it ran in a claret channel toward the cliffs of Golgoth.
8
A Family
Somewhere on the Mainland.
Damien took one last look out of the window. Somewhere, too far in the distance to know exactly where, black smoke rose into the sky and met with a grey overhanging cloud. He picked up a wooden board, placed it over the window and felt his heart grow heavy as he smothered out the last trace of daylight.
He felt like his body was shaking, but when he looked down at his hands they were still. He felt crushed under the weight of responsibility but he was scared that there would be nothing left of him if it were ever gone. It worried him that decades from now his body would melt and his bones would be dust, and he wondered what would remain after that. He hoped and feared there would be nothing.
He’d done things the usual way, at first. He fell for a girl a year his junior after giving her his last cigarette in the bathroom of a Black Bassoon concert. By the time he realised his first marriage wasn’t going to work out the punk ethos was just a memory, and he based his second marriage choice around the fact that his bride’s dad owned a chain of oriental all-you-can-eats. Then, when he realised money didn’t fill emotional holes, he gave up. He ploughed through life for a while, then slowed down, then drifted. He drifted all the way into a third marriage and into being a father of two.
It was the cycle of Damien’s life. Periods where he’d fight like hell with his back to the ropes, followed by painful defeats and then lifeless drifting. Which cycle was he in now? Since the outbreak he thought that the fight had been knocked out of him, but then what was he doing, if not fighting? You couldn’t drift your way to survival these days, yet here he was.
He looked at the bottle on the bedside counter, and then his stare lingered on the two children in the double bed. They might have been sleeping, though he knew they weren’t. Only one of them needed the insulin, and Damien had tried it first to make sure it wasn’t dangerous. He never trusted the trader. Damien looked at his daughter and felt sorry for her. He knew it was wrong to think it, but he blamed Sara for this. She was the one with diabetes in her family.
He looked at the walls around him and was glad of their protection. It was a two bedroom house on the end of a block. Fields of grass surrounded the row of homes, though it wasn’t as remote a place as he first thought. A half mile away was a hamlet of fifty houses, and two miles west was a village that seemed perpetually under a barrage of rain.
The house had been surprisingly easy to settle on, which made Damien laugh at first. He remembered when he and Sara had been looking for a family home, back when you actually had to buy them. He remember the build-up of anticipation before viewing one, followed by a crashing fall as he saw something wrong with it within seconds of crossing the doorway. Despite the hours spent and the countless frustrations, he thought of the period as one of the happiest of his life. Jack was a year old, and Sara’s belly was swollen with his soon-to-be-born sister, and Damien and Sara held hands as they inspected kitchen surfaces and measured outdoor space. It was a rare moment in his life when he saw the future with any kind of clarity.
The wooden tread of the doorway creaked under the pressure of someone behind him.
“Did you fix the barricades?”
It was Sara, hair greased back from weeks without a wash, eyes dark and a stained shirt slack around her thin frame. Damien put his hand to his own hair and felt the dryness of it. He’d washed himself a couple of days earlier, which had caused a ruckus between them. She’d started it, but she had a point. Boiling water to wash was a waste when they needed it to drink.
“Yeah I fixed them.”
“Even the kitchen window?”
“I told you, it’s done.”
“I think we might go to the Dome,” she said.
“Don’t you think that’s joint decision?”
She folded her arms. “It’s the safest place to be.”
Damien closed his eyes and shook his head. This again. He felt the irritation rise in him.
“You’ve heard the rumours. I told you what Wes said about the D
ome.”
“You mean the trader you don’t trust? They’ll say anything to get a sale.”
“That’s as maybe, but we can’t go anywhere yet, can we? What’s the point in even making plans for the future if everything could be over in the next hour?”
Sara glanced over his shoulder and at the bed where the little figures didn’t stir.
“Don’t talk that way. They might wake up fine.”
“What are their odds?” He couldn’t keep the scorn out of his voice, but he knew it wasn’t for her, not really.
“This isn’t poker.”
He turned and looked at his children. Their faces were drained of colour and their breaths were shallow. Lindsey’s skin glistened with sweat, and the veins on both their heads were unnaturally prominent, almost as if their bodies were translucent.